TOS

Travel the World

Homeschool Review Crew

I have always wanted to travel the world. But, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to. A goal for my parenting is to help my children see and experience as much as I can. We’re doing just that by using Let’s Go Geography as part of our homeschool. As we get online and login we get to travel to different places every week. Much fun is being had in our geography travels!

Where would you go if you could go anywhere? That is a question I asked my kids when we started with this geography course. Geography hasn’t been a huge part of our homeschool until this year. I was interested in what countries or states or continents interested my kids so we could make sure and do those first.

About the Program

Travel the world in style. Your own style that is! Let’s Go Geography is a three year course that allows you to travel through a few states in the United States as well as some countries each year. You can plan on two regions of the United States plus roughly 26 countries each year. With the curriculum access or download you get access for one year for one teacher or mom to use with her children or a coop class.

Each week an email comes to my inbox telling me what the destination of our travels will be. It is a 36 week course but does allow a few break weeks as well as some review weeks. There are two reviews per semester plus a review at the end of the year.

Because everything you need is set out for you this is a very easy program to follow. You can use it a bit every day or make one day a geography day and do it all then.

This program is designed for grades kindergarten through fourth. I have also been using it with my fifth and sixth graders and my preschooler. It is very easily adaptable.

What’s it Like?

You are going to go online into your back “office” location. There you click on the schedule week you wish to do. It will then have you click to download or access the PDF which you can print off. Each destination has six chapters for you to work through. These are:

Chapter 1: Map it! Here you learn where you are going in your travel the world course and pin or mark it on a map. Plus you’ll learn a few basic facts.

Chapter 2: The Flag! Learn about the country flag and what it means/symbolizes. You’re going to color/cut and have lots of fun learning about and doing some hands on fun with the flag.

Chapter 3: The Music! Listen to music from the country and learn about their culture. There are also videos to watch. These are safe to view videos. Nothing questionable to have to worry about like simply looking stuff up on YouTube.

Chapter 4: Let’s Explore! Go sighseeing! See what the country has to offer. Check into some different areas of the country and get to know the people. Plus some fun facts.

Chapter 5: Create! Hands on activities with step by step directions. Much fun to be had.

Our Thoughts

I love that it isn’t a set in stone journey. We can travel the world as we want to and are not locked into going to this destination then this one in a set order. I could jump around and choose where we would visit based on my kids interests or what we were studying in other areas of our homeschool. It’s very easy to supplement other reading books to where we travel each week as well. Those get stuck in our morning book basket and the kids can read on them during free reading time. Sometimes finding board book or toddler/preschool level reading books about where we travel can be hard though.

I do feel I should mention that it is made to be a set in stone journey. We chose not to use it that way and it worked really well for us. We also used this four days a week. Because the whole week is laid out we still got all of the information covered.

Some of the countries we decided to visit include Canada, Greenland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This week we’re finishing up visiting Iceland. As you can tell other than Canada we are staying in a central location. Because there are reviews we did decide to do countries only within semester 1. All of these are in that semester so they do tend to stay centralized somewhat. I like that we can have the flexibility to jump around as we want.

I personally am learning and enjoying this program. My kids are loving it. I can see us continuing to use this and most likely purchasing years 2 and 3 as well so we can continue our exploration.

Let’s talk about the Break weeks just a little bit. It’s basically a week where there are no lessons. Week 9 is the first break week. For us we just will be skipping over that break week and “saving” it for later. We tend to take a week break off of all school during slow times in my husbands business(he’s self employed) and during the off season for doing some amazing field trips. So break weeks are just not being done here currently.

Now review weeks. I love this idea! The first review week is week 12. If you follow the schedule there would be 10 countries visited to review. We’ve already done 6 countries but only two of them are in that section. I am planning on skipping that week as a review and just doing another lesson. We will then finish visiting all semester one spots and do two review weeks back to back after we’ve done all the countries.

You will need some kind of a notebook or binder to keep all your activities and pages in. They call it a travel journal. Neat idea! So we grabbed a package of writing paper for each child plus a three ring binder that I will hole punch and put all the papers in. We then put dividers in it to divide out each week.

The 20th Century Lapbook

Homeschool Review Crew

Lapbooks. Have you ever used them? We don’t often but when we do we love to use A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks. They have such fun and simple lapbooks. Recently we’ve been working through the 20th Century Lapbook. This lapbook titled An Overview of the 20th Century is geared towards grades second through seventh so it’s a perfect fit for my crew.

About the Curriculum

This curriculum is a lapbook. Lapbooks are a fun hands on way of learning about a subject. You do a lot of fine motor work with lapbooking so this is great for anyone needing that practice.

The main focus of this lapbook is the 20th century in an overview. It’s a run through of all the main key topics that went on during the 20th century. It is a learning lapbook with a study guide included. There are pages included of reading for teaching about the events. Then you have the pieces to cut and color and glue to your folders. There are also recipes that are fun to make as a family from the depression era.

You can purchase the downloadable file for $8.00 currently while the print version is $18.00. We received the download. While I normally like print things this is a great way to do a lapbook. For us it’s easier to print 9 pages of page 10 than it would be to try and make copies. I did print out the entire lapbook so that I have it in a binder for quick reference.

Our Thoughts

I love these lapbooks. They’re so fun and engaging plus lots of hands on fine motor skill practice. Because this lapbook was the 20th Century Lapbook I feel it didn’t really focus on any one issue that we faced and merely glanced over them. I’m an over-thinker and an over-teacher of things. So, you might have already guessed this but we added a lot of information to our lapbooks. Lots of extra reading and even some rabbit trails. The original lapbook was to be 3 folders big. Our is still going to be three folders big we’re just mushing a few extra facts in there. Really and truly I have only printed about 5 extra things to stick in our folders. The rest is just information that we’ve learned and read about to add to what is already mentioned.

My oldest son is 10 and he wants to do an entire lapbook on just World War II. I told him we could definitely do that but first he would have to do an entire lapbook on World War I. So once we are finished with this lapbook look for a more indepth exploration of those events. There is really no way to do them justice in this lapbook. It hits the key points which is great but inquiring boy minds want to know about war!

This 20th Century lapbook is geared for grades 2-7. So, approximately ages 8-13. I used this with my older nine children. The baby at almost 15 months did not participate much except for having to do some coloring and trying to eat all the tiny scraps of paper. My age range for this was ages 4-12. Now, my four year old is in preschool and probably didn’t understand and won’t remember all that we talked about but she really enjoyed the cutting and pasting part of this and it gave her practice while also imparting knowledge to her.

Learn More

Want to learn more about A Journey Through Learning and the lapbooks they offer? You can check out all the reviews linked up on the main Homeschool Review Crew blog. Also make sure to check them out on social media on facebook, twitter, google +, and instagram. This round members of the crew reviewed two Classical Conversations lapbooks, different Apologia lapbooks, An Overview of the 20th Century, and The Greatest Inventors. Make sure to read over all the different reviews as I’m sure you’ll find something that appeals to you.

About

Welcome to my blog. I'm a stay at home mom of 10. I'm also a home-school mom who enjoys teaching her children and watching them learn. I love to cook and bake for my family. We are a gluten free/lactose free/soy free family so sometimes cooking can be a challenge.

Deborah and Co.

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